Bruce Clay’s take on search engine results with video
When it comes to getting your site found by your prospective clients and customers, search engine results expert Bruce Clay is pretty clear: “If your competition has a video and you don’t, your competition wins.”
As web video producers, of course this was music to our ears!
SEO Advice From Bruce Clay
Clay points out that videos are highly engaging, a topic we’ve been exploring in a series of posts on the psychology of web video. For example, we know that part of why video works so well is that it taps into both our visual and auditory senses and helps them work together to learn and remember more.
Not only do videos draw in searchers and website visitors, but as Clay says, “That kind of an object is something that Google is going to look for both within the Google search results page and on the webpages that it’s indexing.”
Part of what brought on that change is the huge increase of web videos and how they show up in their own designated section of the results page, squeezing out the organic results.
When you add text, whether transcripts or closed captions, the words of your video become additional content for your webpage. That makes your site stronger and more appealing in Google’s eyes and that makes it rank higher on Google’s results page.
Pretty important stuff, when you consider that Clay says it’s no longer good enough to appear somewhere on Page One, because “the top three organic results is the new first page. That changes everything.”
Organic results, as opposed to ads or paid placement, are based purely on the match between what the searcher typed into the box and which sites feature those terms. There are other relevance factors such as the popularity and longevity of the site, or the geographic location.
SEO Tips and Tricks
To help you boost your own search engine rankings, here are a few other SEO factors besides content to keep in mind when you’re creating your website:
- Hosting: Who is hosting your content? Search engines trust reliability, not constant crashing
- Optimize your images: Search engines look for alternate text attached to your photos. Probably a good place for some related keywords
- Use Text Styling: Bolding, italicizing and underlines all add small benefits to overall on page SEO
- Valid Links: Make sure all of the links on your page lead somewhere. Roads with dead ends are travelled less than main routes. The same is true for websites with dead ends.
- XML sitemaps: These sitemaps make it easier for crawlers and bots to scan your content.
- Keywords in Domain: This is an easy tip, if the search or key word is in your domain it’s an immediate promotion up the search results ladder due to perceived importance.
- Site Age and Duration: The older your site is and the longer it’s host time lasts translates to dedication. Your site has longevity and search engines recognize this.
- Avoid URL Errors: Make sure your site and pages are listed definitively as one URL. For example if you can access a site via www.website.com and website.com search engines crawlers may crawl it twice splitting result numbers into two. Consolidate!
*Here are an additional five SEO tips to make your copy rank on Google’s engines.*
So, if you want your site at the top of the organic search results, keep all these tips in mind, and by all means keep those videos rolling!
Thanks to our friends at ReelSEO for posting this video and summary of their chat with Bruce Clay at SMX, the Search Marketing Expo.
